Some people
when sensing they’re dying,
start yelling loud and obscene words at the people around them.
Some others die peacefully with possibly none
or just a few words to tell to those who loved them.

I fall into
the first category.

One can’t
stop the noise that produces
the force of a body that has leapt into the void
Just as one cannot mend a broken love or predict the next lover.

I’m an
ordinary woman and I do not exist.

My life
consists of imaginary conversations that never take place.
In them I sound smart, articulate and beautiful, and I seem to enjoy
the company of people…
those mysterious creatures that always keep me busy
thinking of the possibility of an escape.

I never
meant to wound those I harmed,
I always meant to kill them;
but fell short of confidence to strike the last blow.
I regret nothing but that.

Sometimes I
dream that I die and no one empties my closet,
my smell lingers in a place that is not inhabited
by my body anymore.
Everything looks the same: the books, the notebooks, the bottle of water,
my laptop, the cactus I bought at an old market in Everett Street for $15,
the photos of my life.

No one has
touched anything, though I’m no longer there
and in the dream this pleases me.
Something tells me it’s just my ego dreaming.

My ego is
something else I’ve had a hard time killing.
These days I go out wearing no bra underneath see-through blouses.
I want people to see my imperfections,
I want them to laugh at them, to smile at them, to scold them
(whatever)
and
I
want
to
feel
nothing.

Nor the urge to cover, nor the impulse of showing even more,
just nothing, Zen-like,
like the grass after the storm.

You can’t break a body without
breaking its soul first.

Some other times I dream that you lick my hands
after sex
and you ask me to forgive you.

And yet,
what finally cemented our friendship from the very start was our love of France
and of the French language, or, better yet, of the idea of France –because real
France we no longer had much use for, nor it for us. We nursed this love like a
guilty secret, because we couldn’t undo it, didn’t trust it, didn’t even want
to dignify it with the name of love. But it hovered over our lives like a
fraught and tired heirloom dated back to our respective childhoods in colonial
North Africa. Perhaps it wasn’t even France, or the romance of France we loved;
perhaps France was the nickname we gave our desperate reach for something firm
in our lives– and for both of us the past was the firmest thing we had to hold
on to, and the past in both cases was written in French.

[…]

We blamed
Cambridge for not being Paris, the way over the years I’ve blamed many places
for not being Cambridge, which is like blaming someone for not being someone
else or for not living up to who they never claimed they were.

When you move to a new city, you find out where the nearest bookshop is. If you're lucky enough, you'll purchase a great book featuring the same city you're now living in. I have not finished the book yet, but I know for certain: it will make me cry.

CR

André Aciman

I still
remember the morning smell of bleach and lye with which Zeinab would mop up the
floor of Café Algiers while the chairs sat upturned on the café’s minuscule
tables. The place was closed to customers, but they’d let a few of us in –regulars
who spoke Arabic and French– and allowed us to wait for the coffee to brew. One
look at the poster of Tipaza and your body ached for sea water and beach rituals
you didn’t even know you’d stopped remembering. All of Café Algiers took me
back to Alexandria, the way it took Kalaj back to Tunis, and the Algerian to
Oran. Perhaps each one of us would stop by Café Algiers every day to pick up
the person we’d left behind in North Africa, each working things back to that
point where life must have taken a wrong turn, each as though trying to put
time on splints until the fracture and the cracks and the dislocations were
healed and the bone finally fused. Sheltered from the morning sun and wrapped
in the strong scent of coffee and of cleaning fluids, each found his way back
to his mother.